Incarnation – Carte Blanche to Jeanne Vicerial connects the Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, the Musée des Tapisseries, the Chapelle de la Visitation, and the sculpture gallery of the Musée Granet, offering the public a chance to explore different perspectives on the artist’s work.

Christel Pélissier-Roy, director of the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire – Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, Musée des Tapisseries and the Musées du Vieil Aix—regularly invites contemporary artists to take over these spaces and draw from their collections. Through their eyes, the collections come to life, offering a fresh perspective. The collections are very much alive; ancient and contemporary works respond to one another, engage in dialogue, and reveal each other.

Textile plays a central role in Jeanne Vicerial’s work; a material that is both intimate and universal, it maintains a constant dialogue with the body: it clothes, protects, envelops, reveals, or conceals. But beyond its practical functions, textile carries within it a memory—that of gestures, uses, and the traces left by the bodies that have worn or transformed it. It thus becomes the silent witness to past presences, the medium of a history that is at once individual, intimate, and collective. The sculptures become sorts of imaginary bodies or traces of visible and invisible lives.

Exploring the female body and its place in history, and focusing on transcendental transitional objects, she sets her figures within an extended timeline, stretching between the past and the future.
Incarnation does not merely materialize a presence; it exists within a fragile balance between presence and absence, between the density of matter and the fleeting nature of appearance. It is in this balance, between the tangible and the evanescent, that incarnation finds its strength. It is not limited to either one, but unfolds in the space that connects them.

A resident at the Académie de France – Villa Médicis in Rome in 2019–2020, Jeanne Vicerial embarked on a unique artistic practice combining sculptural clothing and textiles with music, performance, and film, most often through collaborative projects. This carte blanche will beautifully illustrate this, bringing together collaborations with artists and creators from diverse backgrounds: photographer Leslie Moquin, filmmaker Louise Ernandez, sculptor Ivan Le Pays, the artistic director of Maison Lesage – le19M Hubert Barrère, and philosopher Claire Marin.

The exhibition is designed as a journey through several complementary spaces, each exploring a different dimension of this idea of incarnation. The Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme is conceived as a studio, a space for work, research, and experimentation that visitors experience as a home inhabited by the creative process. The Musée des Tapisseries will be devoted to the crafts of sewing, with a space dedicated to the opera-ballet Atys, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s lyric tragedy directed and choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, for which Jeanne Vicerial designed the costumes. The Chapelle de la Visitation becomes an immersive space, where the works are arranged in a procession-like formation. Finally, at the Musée Granet, the exhibition manifests itself more discreetly through subtle touches: a few sculptures installed in the sculpture gallery, as well as bronze busts of women. A photographic project created with photographer Leslie Moquin at the Villa Medici will also explore the relationship between bodies and sculptures.

This exceptional exhibition brings together works on loan from private and public collections, as well as works created by the artist specifically for the exhibition.

The exhibition is presented in partnership with Templon and curated by Christel Pélissier-Roy, head of the Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme and director of the City of Aix-en-Provence’s Musées d’Art et d’Histoire.

As a patron of the Aix Biennale, the Crédit Agricole Alpes Provence Foundation has supported this major cultural event since its creation in 2022.